Letter: Disagrees with story on feral cats in county

Editor: This is a rebuttal to the Aug. 14 story about feral cats. As a 16-plus year veteran of feeding at "feral" cat colonies, and as the observant cat person I am, my comments are as follows:

1. In all my years of feeding, and as a bird lover myself, I have never seen, in any colony, a partially eaten bird. My own cats, on the contrary, who eat three times a day, have often tried to catch birds and left some dead. How do you suppose construction, in which thousands of trees are destroyed, affects the birds, raccoons, foxes and other wildlife?

2. Seldom is the great good which BeBe and Goliath's World and P.A.L. (in the past) recognized or even mentioned. Hundreds of feral cats have been trapped, spayed and neutered and leukemia, distemper and rabies shots have been given. Many of these cats have been placed in barns throughout Hastings, Spuds, Elkton, St. Augustine, Ocala, Orlando -- even farther west.

If more people would volunteer to help, rather than criticize those who are working to reduce the population, we could almost lick it.

Just for the record, all my home cats are past ferals I've rescued, neutered and spayed and many of them, left alone, become loving and cuddly.

3. What this county needs are vets who offers low-cost spaying and neutering. They could rotate weeks. As I write, two of my kittens are in a Jacksonville vet clinic being neutered; $20 for males and $35 for females.